


Deep Water

by crazyreader12



Series: It Comes and Goes in Waves [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Booker | Sebastien le Livre Needs Therapy, F/F, Gen, Gratuitous application of soft blankets and hot cocoa, Guilt, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, M/M, Non-Graphic Descriptions of Drowning, Temporary Character Death, and hugs, so does Quynh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:42:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26239537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crazyreader12/pseuds/crazyreader12
Summary: Booker has pulled Quynh from the ocean, now comes the hard part: How does a broken man help an even more broken woman to heal?(Alternatively: Booker and the rediscovery of his paternal instincts ft. Quynh and Nile)
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nile Freeman, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: It Comes and Goes in Waves [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1905973
Comments: 52
Kudos: 235





	1. When I'm Sinking Like a Stone (At Least I Know I'm Not Alone)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Weissnichtwo (LoudenSwain713)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoudenSwain713/gifts).



> Alright guys, y'all wanted a sequel, here it is 😘 Hope you enjoy :)
> 
> All of the thanks to Weissnichtwo (LoudenSwain713), my most wonderful beta for this story and a truly amazing friend. You cheered me on, showed me where I needed to fix and/or improve upon things and I really have no idea what I did to have such an amazing person with a spectacular brain taking an interest in my work 💖💖

She is drowning. She has been drowning for so long she doesn’t recognize the air when she breathes it or the sun on her face when she feels it or the sounds that aren’t her screams and pounding when she hears them, for...well. She lost all sense of time long ago. She is on dry land and no longer alone and still she drowns, until she gasps awake one morning/afternoon/night (she does not remember the difference) and realizes all at once that she chokes and sputters on nothing and beats on something soft and warm and not remotely anything like that thrice cursed iron box. 

She is dry and warm and nothing hurts, and she can breathe, she can breathe, she  _ breathes.  _ It is enough that she falls, again, unconscious. 

She wakes and she sleeps and she drowns and she screams and she wakes and she sleeps and she drowns and she screams and she  _ wakes _ . 

She doesn’t know how long it has been when she realizes that she is not alone, that there is someone else here with her. They feed her and they wipe her face and give her water and hold her when she trashes and it is not until she realizes that she’s killed them at least once (she doesn’t remember a lot) that she takes notice of the other things. 

He has told her his name, she is sure, but she doesn’t remember it; he is sad, which she thinks she only knows because they are, the both of them, suffering and so she hears that, in him. He says her name and she doesn’t hear it or perhaps it’s that she doesn’t remember it. But she knows his voice. 

How does she know his voice? She killed him. She knows his face. She killed him. He is still here. She knows his voice. 

(She sleeps she drowns she screams she wakes she sleeps she drowns she)

He is one of them. 

Them. 

She’d been part of a them, once. 

...Is she still?

There was a them. There are (were?) others. Are they here? She doesn’t think so, but…

(she sleeps she drowns she screams she wakes she sleeps she drowns she screams she wakes she- she  _ lives) _

It’s only him. The others aren’t here.  _ She  _ isn’t here. Where are they? Where is she? Why isn’t she here?

(she sleeps,  _ she  _ is screaming, screaming, screaming, the box slams shut, she wakes, she sleeps she drowns she screams, she wakes she  _ lives, lives, lives.)  _

_ Who are you, where are you, where are you, where are you, why aren’t you here with me? Why were you not the one who came? _

He is gentle, always, she slowly comes to realize, once she remembers what gentleness means and that it exists: gentle hands, gentle voice even when she doesn't know what it is saying (which is most of the time.)

Why is it only ever him?

(she sleeps, they both scream and scream and scream and the box closes and she can still hear  _ her  _ screaming screaming screaming and then she is in the water, she drowns, she screams and beats her fists bloody, she wakes, she lives, she sleeps)

Why can’t she remember? 

She begins to see and she hadn’t even realized that she could not before (all she has seen for so long is the water and the dark dark dark.) 

The room is bright (but there are curtains so it is dim, her eyes are the problem) the blanket is colours (she hadn’t remembered what anything other than the dark dark dark looked like and she still doesn’t know the names) his hair is light and his eyes are soft and sad sad sad. 

_ Where are you A- Where are you why are you not here An- _

Maybe she speaks, she doesn’t know, or even if the sounds coming out of her are words (it has been so very very long.)

(she sleeps, they scream, she can see  _ her  _ face now, bloody and beautiful and screaming, screaming, screaming, and  _ she  _ is gone, she is in the water, she drowns, she screams, she wakes, she lives)

There were others, aside from  _ her _ , she knows, the others who are also not there. Who are (were?) they? 

She knows the man’s face. She has seen  _ hers.  _ But where are the others?  _ Who? _

He tries to help her stand up, but she does not know her legs and they betray her. She is gently (gentle, always so gentle, this man, why?) lifted back to the bed. 

She hears him when he says that they will try tomorrow. 

He feeds her, and she eats, and she s l e e p s.

(she sleeps and they are screaming, the two of them, she is burning in the sand,  _ they  _ are smiling, kissing, fighting, she can see them now, these two men that she once knew, and the box closes and she is drowning and she screams and she wakes and she lives and little by little, she begins to  _ remember. _ )

How long has it been? How long has she been here, (safe, warm, dry) how long was she there (cold, dark, wet, drowning, drowning, drowning). She doesn’t know. 

Who is  _ she?  _ Who are the men? What are their names? What are any of their names? She thinks the man has told her, maybe many times, but she doesn’t remember them. 

But she knows their faces, now. 

Who? Who? Who?

Where? Where? Where?

How long since she has seen them, since she has been with them?

Why?

Why are they not  _ here? _ Who is this man who she does not know but for his face and voice and that he is gentle and sad, that he is?

He speaks, and sometimes she hears/understands/remembers but most of the time she doesn’t. 

The blanket is red and purple and the walls are brown.

(she sleeps, she  _ dreams,  _ she knows now she is dreaming, and she sees  _ her  _ (An-Andr-) and the men, and another one who laughs and fights and coughs up bloods and dies and another, she is young and calls her by name, but she doesn’t remember it, and they scream and the box closes and she drowns and she screams and she wakes and (Androm-) she lives.)

She is awake, the blanket is purple and red, the walls are made of wood and the curtains are yellow. She does not hurt, but neither can she stand on her own. (Not yet, they have been trying, she thinks perhaps it will be soon.) 

He comes into the room, with food in his hands (a bowl, she remembers. Soup.) She looks at him. His eyes are blue, his hair is blond, his shirt is a dull kind of green, and he is sad. She thinks, now, that if he tells her his name, she will remember it this time. 

“Wh-where. Where is she? Where is Andromache?” And Quynh does not know her own name before she speaks, but she does now, and she knows  _ Andromache Andromache Andromache.  _ The names of the men she will remember soon, she knows. Perhaps even the girl. 

But that is for later. Now is for

_ W h e r e i s A n d r o m a c h e ? _


	2. Please Tell Me I Won't Wash Away

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A huge, massive, ginormous thank you to the best beta a girl could ask for, Weissnichtwo (LoudenSwain713). You, ma'am, are the best and I love your awesome brain. 
> 
> Warnings for temp. character death and a brief mention of blood on someone's face, nothing super graphic. Also, not-so-great mental states.

It’s been long enough since he brought her here that when Quyhn finally speaks actual, comprehensible words, it takes Booker a few moments to realize that it isn’t his own exhausted imagination. 

(Days, weeks, almost two months of thrashing and screaming and holding her down to keep her from hurting herself, trying to make her understand that she’s safe now, alive, and staying that way, sleeping only in fitful, nightmare ridden catnaps. Long enough that he was starting to wonder if he’d really seen any progress at all or if it was just wishful thinking.)

He’s not at all surprised that her first question is about Andy. He’s told Quynh some of what’s happened, about Andy, Nicky and Joe, Nile, and even a bit about himself, but he doesn’t think that she’s registered much of it, if any. Maybe now that she’s started to talk they’ll be able to make more progress. 

“I don’t know,” he tells her, and it’s true. He hasn’t had the time to try and track the others down. “She was alive, though, the last time I saw her.”

“Why?” Quynh’s voice is rough, hoarse and cracked from centuries of disuse and if this conversation continues, Booker’s going to need to get her some water. 

(That had been an ordeal, the first few times. Quynh had thought that the water was going to drown her; forgotten that it could be anything else. She’d killed him thrice with her bare hands before remembering how to swallow. He’d been utterly disinclined to stop her and take the risk that he might hurt her more than she already has been. He resolutely ignores how familiar that feeling is, and puts his focus into putting into use long-since-gone-rusty Viatnamese.) 

“I’m not welcome with them right now,” he tells her, and the truth burns his throat. It’s the first time he’s said it out loud. 

Quynh’s brows draw together, confused. She tries to say something else, coughs, and by the time Booker returns with water, she’s asleep again. 

He sighs, draws the blanket back up around her shoulders, and goes to take the shower he’s been meaning to for at least three days.

The sun has just dipped below the horizon and Booker is in the middle of heating up yet another can of chicken soup when a loud thud from Quynh’s room announces that she’s thrashed her way to the floor. Again. Booker groans softly, and goes to lift her back into the bed, only to find that Quynh has managed to get herself most of the way there on her own; her legs aren’t quite up to the challenge of lifting her up. 

Making sure to deepen his tread so as not to startle her, Booker comes up behind her to grasp her shoulders and lift. She goes easier than any time up to then, helping him along with arms and legs that shake like a newborn fawn’s and even managing to mostly maneuver herself under the covers. 

“It is warm,” she says abruptly, once her head is situated on the pillow. “I was always cold, before.”

Booker has spent the last several hours trying to figure out what, exactly, he can tell Quynh about Andy and Joe and Nicky and why they’re not here. (He can’t tell her of Andy’s mortality, not now when she’s still so unstable.) He’s even prepared responses to questions about himself and Nile. Somehow, that deceptively simple statement shakes him to his core and he needs to take a moment to remember to breathe again. 

“I-I’m glad,” he chokes out through the lump in his throat. “It-it’s good that you’re warm.”

Quynh nods in apparent agreement, then-

“You said they, before. I remember, I think, that there were others, two, two men, but I cannot-” 

She breaks off, frustrated. 

“Nicky,” Booker says, on instinct. “And Joe.”

Quynh frowns, then shakes her head slightly. 

“No. Almost, but..no?”

She sounds uncertain of herself, then, and Booker curses himself back to Russia for forgetting. 

“Nicolo then,” he corrects himself, “and Yusuf, they’ve changed, since you were with them, I apologize. Perhaps Nicholas and Joseph?”

Her face clears, and she relaxes slightly. 

“Nicolo,” she repeats, as if savoring the word. “Yusuf. Yes. Yes. Thank you.”

He nods, but can’t bring himself to speak. To Booker’s immense and guilty relief, that is all the speaking Quynh is up to that night, and he is not yet called upon to explain his exile. He retrieves the soup from the stove and feeds it to her; her hands aren’t steady enough yet to hold the spoon, but she is able to sit up mostly on her own. She is asleep before the bowl is more than halfway empty. Booker, his own appetite tiny, eats the rest and nothing else. 

Booker returns to his own room to the longest sleep he’s gotten since he’d first dreamt of Nile, and is woken five hours later to Quynh’s tortured screams. She falls back into sleep without regaining coherence, and while she doesn’t wake again until almost noon the next day, Booker is awake for the rest of the night. 

He reads a section in one of his psychology books on PTSD, stops when it starts to hit too close to home. He tries to plan for what to tell Quynh when she next asks a question, stops when thinking of the others feels like razor blades slicing into his heart. He goes back to the book, pushes his way through a handful more paragraphs, and then curls his body to rest his head against his knees and forces himself to breathe. 

When he comes back to himself, it is to help Quynh reach the bathroom, and show her how it works, then back to the bed. She asks him how long it’s been, and he tells her. She refuses to speak for another three days, and she screams her way through the nights to the point that Booker gives up on sleep entirely and camps on the chair beside the bed. He only leaves her to fetch crackers and water, and, when she works herself up so much that she throws up what little she’d managed to swallow, a new bucket. 

On the fourth day, Quynh’s mostly coherent, but breathtakingly angry. She screams and curses in an impressive array of languages, mostly at Andy, but Nicky and Joe as well. Booker only understands some of the words, which he thinks might be for the best. When he goes to her to try and calm her down, she snaps his neck, and, when he comes to, shoves the handle of a spoon through his eye. When he wakes from that, she’s sitting up in the middle of her bed, arms wrapped around her knees. Her eyes are wide, and staring at him, and her rage seems to have subsided, for the moment. 

He blinks up at her from the floor then grimaces at the tacky feeling of blood caking his face. Quynh doesn’t move, waits until he’s managed to mop up the worst of it with his sleeve (his shirt is already a lost cause) before speaking. 

“I knew your face,” she says, “before you found me.”

It’s not a question. He nods.

“You are like me. Like us.”

“Yes.”

“I hadn’t met you, before.”

“No. I hadn’t been born yet.”

She nods, accepting this.

“Andromache.” she says next. “Nicolo. Yusuf. It has been centuries. You are the one who found me. Did-” She breaks off, and Booker finally notices the tears she is struggling to keep from falling. “Did they not look?”

“Non!” he shouts, though he doesn’t mean to and regrets it when she flinches. He realizes that he’s spoken in French and swallows harshly before continuing, more gently, in Viatnamese. “No. They-they looked, and looked and looked. But they could not find anyone who could tell them with any specificity where you had been dropped and the sea is vast. When they found me, they hoped that my dreams could help, but-.”

“All you could see was water.” She finishes for him. 

“Yes.”

“How did you find me, then?”

“It’s been a long time. Technology has advanced and quite recently, in the scheme of things-” he cuts himself off; his grasp of Viatnamese is not up to this. “Do-do you speak French?”

“Oui,” Quynh says, then continues in flawless, if outdated, French, “Is this easier for you?”

“Yes, thank you. There are ways, now, to detect things deep underwater from the surface and to dive down without drowning. Lights that don’t need fire and can survive the water.”

“And you used these ways, to find me.”

“Yes.”

“Why,” she says like it’s being torn from her, “was it not Andromache?”

Booker swallows, and hopes that he’s not about to sign Andy’s death warrant. 

“I didn’t know her before you were taken from them,” he tells her, “only what Nicky and Joe could bear to tell me. But something-something broke in her, when she lost you, I think. Something vital. And she blames herself for not being able to stop it. It had been centuries by the time that kind of search became possible and- if she had looked. And still not found you. I think it would have destroyed her entirely. So, you got me, instead.”

He doesn’t tell her that he and Nicky and Joe had talked about it, when he’d first heard of deep-sea diving. That they’d decided not to tell Andy the extent of what sonar and diving could do. Maybe it had been horrifically selfish of them, but they would’ve lost her if Quynh still couldn’t have been found. They’d made loose plans to look themselves, if they ever were able to do so away from their leader’s watchful eyes and all-too-breakable heart. Booker doesn’t know if Nicky and Joe had tried during their year apart; they hadn’t had time to talk about it. Booker hadn’t. He’d already made his plans to kill them both. 

He wonders if Nicky and Joe suspect that he’s been looking, but disregards the thought as soon as it comes. It doesn’t matter either way; she’s been found. 

(He doesn't know if he'd be able to stomach their surprise.)

After several moments of tense silence, Quynh sags sideways into her pillow, still curled up, and closes her eyes. 

“Leave, please,” she whispers. "Just...leave."

Booker, at a loss for anything else to do, pulls the blanket over her, and does as she says. He’s got a feeling that he’s going to need to break open the psych books again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys for reading, hope you enjoyed, comments are always very much appreciated should you be so inclined 😘
> 
> I'm also open to anyone who feels like popping in to say hi (or yell at me for the angst) on tumblr, where I'm @bookjoyworm. 
> 
> Next up: Enter Nile


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